Over at the Play-Generated Maps and Documents Archive, curator Tim Hutchings is displaying some fantastic stuff donated by Bill Owen dating back to the campaign his future partner in Judges Guild, Bob Bledsaw, began after purchasing the original Dungeons & Dragons books at Gen Con in August of 1974.

I noticed when using Google search to look for "Adventurer Conqueror King" that it auto-completes - which is a good sign that people are looking for info about ACKS - and that one of the things it auto-completes as is "Adventurer Conqueror King release date", which suggests that this is something in particular that people want to know. Reasonable enough! Here's the best answer I can give at the moment.

Over at The Mule Abides, contributor Charlatan has posted a system using the ACKS rules to "make the dungeon itself a resource to be managed: If the PCs appear to be hauling loot up risk-free, others will be emboldened to try their luck in the dungeon’s depths."

The Autarch designers are going to be at GaryCon with print editions of ACKS and with playtest versions of the Player's Companion. We've got four different ACKS scenarios running - a linked series of adventures running Thursday to Saturday, plus a late-night Saturday session of swampy mayhem.

We are excited to announce that the final draft of the Adventurer Conqueror King System went to the printers today. We are now merely weeks away from the game hitting stores. Thank you again to all the backers and supporters who have made this possible.

New York­- Jan. 5, 2012– This Thursday, January 6th, game development studio Autarch™ is hosting a party at the Soho Gallery of Digital Art. The Thursday night party celebrates Autarch's deal with distributor GameSalute to bring the Adventurer Conqueror King System™ into retail stores following its wildly successful crowd-funding effort on Kickstarter - helped in no small measure by ACKS' stunning cover, an oil painting by Ryan Browning, and the video animation thereof by Timothy Hutchings. Both of these works will be on view in the gallery.

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What People Are Saying!

“I've been running this game for months now using an open world sandbox game, similar to Ben Robbins' West Marches game, and it's downright amazing. Love the comprehensive rules for everything economic and the B/X framework with layered extras, like proficiencies and special maneuvers (disarm, wrestling, etc.). If you're at all into D&D, I would check this out.”

“What does this offer that the OSR books and rules already in your collection don't? Strongholds, domains, and even mercantile ventures are addressed. Yes, your character may just outgrow the dungeon life. If you play in any fantasy type RPG and are interested in building your own campaign, many of the tools are here.”

“It makes good on D&D's largely unfulfilled promise to take characters from lowly insignificance to the heights of power. There are rules for building castles, establishing and ruling domains (as well as wizard's sanctums and thieves guilds), and trading -- just about anything a high-level, power-hungry fantasy character might be interested in pursuing. Adventurer, Conqueror, King is a very cleverly designed game whose rules are quite compatible with most retro-clones, particularly Labyrinth Lord, making it extremely valuable to any player or referee looking to add any of its rules to their existing campaigns. This is good stuff and well worth a look.”

“Adventurer Conqueror King adds a new wing to the Old School with its epic-scale world construction rules, which help the Judge develop an entire setting, logically and organically, in the sandbox spirit of the hobby's earliest campaigns.”

— Allen Varney

“This is what a rationalised 21st century dungeoncrawling RPG can look like: enough old school aspects to appeal to grognards, but with enough mechanical crunch to appeal to new(er) school players. The systems maths is robust enough that it doesn't fall to pieces if you breathe on it, but simple enough that you only need to do simple-addition-up-to-20 in play. And we did it crowdfunded and with substantiative fan base interaction and customer feedback.”

“The Player's Companion extends the core rules by adding a series of new classes, the dwarven machinist and spelunker, the elven ranger, and some human classes - mystic (monk), shaman (druid), and priestess. I'll come out and say it though, the thing that got me fired up with the book-love was the extensive list of templates. (I think they claim there are 144 of them). An ACKS template is basically some pre-selected options that speeds up character generation and gives the character a bit of early flavor. ACKS supports the old school roll-and-go - it's got basic 3d6 in order for abilities and simple classes, like classic D&D. The templates take it the rest of the way, by adding a preconfigured set of starting equipment, starting money, and suggested proficiency selections.”